All posts tagged ‘Catan’

You’ve traded wood for sheep, but have you ever traded Dilithium for Tritanium? Mayfair Games has taken The Settlers of Catan in a bold new direction, re-theming the standard-bearer for hobby gaming with a top-shelf license in Star Trek. The news of this combo set the geek world abuzz, but today we’ll be answering a very important question: Does Star Trek make Catan a better game?

All right, board game enthusiasts, this is your warning: For the next couple of minutes I am about to go all Chicken Little on you. Recently, a couple of chunks of something hit my head, and at the time I swore it was the sky.

Last month Mayfair Games announced that they would be introducing Star Trek: Catan at Gen Con to be sold exclusively at Target. Then, as Dave Banks told you on this site last week, Geek & Sundry announced that they had signed a marketing deal that will put little green “As seen on Geek & Sundry” stickers on all the games which have been featured on TableTop and sell them at … Target. My instant response to these two announcements was to put on my best Skywalker twisted pouty face and scream “Noooooooooo!”

So do these two announcements mean the sky is falling for quality board games and in particular for local game stores? Maybe. Let’s look at each announcement separately and see whether or not it is time to run for the bunker.

Who knew that watching others play board games could be so fun? The first edition of the show Tabletop on the Geek & Sundry channel proved that watching Wil Wheaton and friends play Small World wasn’t only fun, but interesting too. Wheaton returns with a new group of pals, Jane Espenson, James Kyson, and Neil Grayston as they play the incredibly popular Settlers of Catan.

If you’ve never played, watching Tabletop can be a great way to learn the rules. But even if you’re a seasoned pro, the play-by-play and banter is very entertaining. Parents be warned, there’s some mild language in this episode.

I promise: I tried to hate this book, I really did! Up front, I beg all of my fellow members of the cult of Catan to forgive me if you can. I mean, I pretty much despise the idea of a product tie-in with any board game, but I have come to expect such shenanigans from the corporate game companies in the United States. Battleship: The Movie, anyone? But now the Europeans are selling out too? And not just any European but the icon of European board games, Klaus Teuber. The world is truly doomed!

To make a novel from my beloved Settlers of Catan is beyond the pale! It is a sacrilege! After all it was Catan that re-ignited my interest in board games and taught me that not all of them had to be three hours of wasted life like Axis and Allies. (I mean, after the giant tank vs. infantry battle in Russia, which happens in the first hour of the game, you still have two more boring hours to play and the game is already over. I say if the Russians win call it for the Allies, and if by miracle Germany wins then call if for the Axis, end of game. Better yet, why don’t you take three red dice and I will take three white dice and we will roll them for three hours, add up who won the most rolls and call it good.) Catan was and is so much better. Settlers of Catan single-handedly made board games cool again. It is one of the few board games which can entertain both my 64-year-old Mother and nine-year-old daughter. It is simple enough that my nine-year-old can win, and yet it gives me enough of an illusion of control and choice that I don’t lose interest. It really is a genius game.

For almost a decade it was the password to a secret cult of European board games. At the beginning no one had heard of it, and it felt like a kind of alternative board game. Something far better than the standard party games which were still stuck on Pictionary and Taboo. Catan was like my own version of the ’90s rave. You had to know someone to find out about it.

This picture is why I started GeekDad. It was taken about two years ago on our back patio and shows my then 9-year-old Daniel and me with our Lego UAV, which we had just built together. He was into Lego, and I was into robotics. I’d been given a RC plane and had got the idea that the three could go together: a Lego Mindstorms NXT autopilot robotically flying an RC plane. And thus was born the Lego UAV!

Daniel and I had worked on the code all weekend. It had turned out to be a perfect father-son project: fun for him and fun for me. Not fun for him and boring for me, like so many other projects aimed at kids. And not fun for me but boring for him, like so many adult projects fathers try to get their kids interested in. But instead a meeting of kid and grown-up interests, turned into a fantastic weekend activity.

The search for similar geeky projects that cut across generational appeal led me to start GeekDad. My jokey early motto was “Permission to play with cool toys isn’t the only reason to have kids, but it’s up there.” The point was to focus on the Venn intersection of geek interest and parenting: to find cool science/tech/culture things that are fun for us and equally fun for our kids.

I bought the domain for not much from a nice guy who wasn’t using it, and then started blogging intermittently. Then I invited friends to join me, and then put out an open call for other geek dads to participate.

The rest is history: I had the good fortune to have Ken Denmead respond to the call, and the wisdom to realize that he was the perfect leader to take GeekDad to the next level. Ken, in turn, recruited most of the amazing geekdads (and a few geekmoms) who you’ve been reading here every day and have been introducing themselves today, our anniversary. They are awesome; every day I read the posts and marvel at what this site has become, thanks to the energy, creativity and passion of these inspiring parents.

I’m now happily emeritus, contributing when I can but mostly cheering from the sidelines. As for my UAV projects, well, they eventually failed the GeekDad test: they got too geeky for the kids. Now I have to bribe the tribe with ice cream to come to flight testing sessions with me and man the cameras, and the technology has gone way over their head.

But I haven’t given up on looking for the Venn ideal of GeekDad projects. We’ve started painting models and Warhammer figures together, and we’re playing lots of Settlers of Catan. I’m gently introducing the geek canon of movies and books (from The Matrix to Ender’s Game). And then there’s always videogames, the ultimate father-child role reversal (they can’t believe how slow I am).